Breaking: BlizzCon tickets on sale... kind of

It's Monday, August 11th, and that means that BlizzCon tickets are on sale. Except, they're really not. Blizzard's new Blizzard Store site is epic fail broken -- all most people are seeing is the "error has occured" screen above.

Hopefully this isn't a preview of things to come. and hopefully Blizzard will figure out a fair way to get these tickets out (because right now, the site certainly isn't working). Expect more updates to this post as the process goes along.

Update: Seems like a lot of people are making it to the credit card verification screen before things go bad, so it seems (seems) the fault may be with the credit card approvals, not necessarily Blizzard's site. Also, one big change from last year is that not only do you specify your WoW character during checkout, but they ask you to say your favorite Blizzard franchise, as well.

10:52am: Alex got this great error message. "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete." Sad. And yet true.

11:08am: Blizzard's website, blizzard.com, is completely down. Whether that's because it's offline purposely (Blizzard employees reportedly showed up at their officers at 8am their time, a few minutes ago), or because it's completely b0rked, we don't know.

11:16am: At least we can all commiserate together. From commenter Boven (thanks!):

11:19am: Store's back online.

11:31am: And it's back down again. Probably safe to say that at least one of these outages is caused by all the traffic.

11:32am: Blizzard is aware of the problems and working on it. In the meantime they say that Billing and Account Services and the In-game Support departments are not the way to go on this one -- neither of them will be helping with ticket issues.

12:01pm: Just for the heck of it (and because we're suckers for punishment), we just called the Blizzard Store sales line, and what you might expect happened: we got nothing but beeping. We haven't heard from anyone yet who's actually been able to buy a ticket this morning. Have any of you?

12:05pm: You know how when you see a word a lot, it starts not making sense? That's happening for us with "an error has occurred."

12:57pm: Despite our repeated clicking, the Failoc still isn't letting us past. The farthest we've gotten so far is C. At this rate, looks like Mike Morhaime and Jay Mohr will be the only two people at BlizzCon '08. (Note: That was a joke. Jay Mohr probably won't be hosting again.)

1:51pm: The good news is that Blizzard confirms that no tickets have been sold yet. So you're not the only one frustrated and angry that you can't secure your spot at BlizzCon. We await further updates from them -- the sites are going up and down now, with people seeing all kinds of things, from Failocs to regular error messages, from XML errors to even 404 Apache server pages. But as Blizzard has said, no tickets have been sold yet at all, so nobody panic.

2:22pm: This, from Cilos on Silver Hand:

Hilarious.

And our own Michael Gray writes a haiku:

Oh, the fail Murloc:You innocent harbingerof Blizzard's errors.

4:38pm: Failoc is back. Never thought I'd be so happy to see him, as the past few hours have given us only the maintenance SCV.

4:48pm: So close! We're seeing a few "working" reports come in, but all we're getting is timeouts so far.

8:30pm: Oh yes, we're still here and still refreshing. Blizzard has updated their main BlizzCon site, saying that everything should be working fine now, but that's still not the case for us -- Failoc keeps showing up long before we can get confirmation. Hopefully we'll make it through one of these times, and hopefully we'll see you there at BlizzCon. In the meantime, epic fail, Blizzard. Epic fail.

9:42pm: Blizzard took the store down again, and the maintenance SCV is back. We just ordered takeout -- it's gonna be a long night.